


How Can I Choose?

by Schweet



Category: Original Work
Genre: Bisexuality, LGBTQ Themes, Religion, Roman Catholicism, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:15:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24990673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schweet/pseuds/Schweet
Kudos: 1





	How Can I Choose?

I am bisexual and Catholic and I don’t know how to feel about that.  
I haven't really been Catholic for years, as I have never truly felt welcome by my stiff, upright, self-serving, traditional, hypocritical church. St. John’s. So much anxiety comes with those two words alone. A response trained from years of hiding.  
I have always felt I was hiding from them for as long as I can remember, but I never could figure out why. It wasn’t until November 2019 that I finally figured out why. I thought it was because I just believed different things than many of the parishioners and priests. I thought it was because I was learning how to love myself at night like all teenagers do. I thought it was because I enjoyed seeing the blood run freely from my thighs and wrists. I thought it was because of many things. But never this. Lord help me never this.  
For all of the reasons to burn in hell, why must it be this one. That's a place I’m not sure even really exists. I don’t doubt its existence because I’m scared of it, but because I don’t really believe in Heaven either. And why would one exist without the other? I have always believed we don’t have it exactly right, but one of the few things I think we got right is the idea of balance. With extreme evil must come extreme good. I have seen that in my own life and now I’m seeing it at play in our world and country. I believe in balance and yet I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. Why would an absent God create a limitless afterlife with three locations if he can’t even be bothered to check in once a decade on his creations? If God ever was real, he’s either dead or a bastard.  
I reject my religion and everything I have ever been taught. I prayed before every family dinner, I never missed a Sunday mass, not even if there was snow on the ground. I fell asleep to lullabies proclaiming Jesus’s love for his little lambs. Turns out that wasn’t enough. Maybe I should have switched to that private Catholic school with my little sisters. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t be what I am now.  
I am the worst thing a Catholic can be. Gay.  
I like women. I do, I really do. The thought of a woman caressing my face with her soft palms and gentle lips makes my soul bloom like a flower in the first glimpse of springtime sunshine. I will walk past a man and not blink twice, only turning my head if I have known him for a very long time and know him deeply and his soul intimately. Like David from 8th grade math. I had a crush for years. The only other crush I have ever had is with my best friend. My female best friend. Who has a boyfriend. And it’s been my strongest crush. I have been in love with her for years. Finally explains why I was so terrified to hold her hand in church as she introduced me to her friends and the older members of her parish.  
A random lovely lady can walk past me in the supermarket with her hair in a messy bun, wearing an oversized, stained t-shirt, grey yoga pants, and the ugliest pair of neon Crocs I have ever seen and I can barely keep from staring as she turns the corner, leaving me stranded and alone and floundering in the frozen foods aisle as she moves on to baking. Fighting with this piece of me.  
And I don’t know what to do with this piece of me. Am I expected to shove this piece down within me and deprive it of warmth and sunshine and the nutrients of a kind woman’s smile? Am I supposed to turn my back on this intrinsic portion of myself because some men in a dusty old book tell me it’s wrong? Am I supposed to hate myself for this too?  
What’s even so wrong about this? It’s love. So what if our genitals don’t oppose the other, so what if while opposites attract, I’m not attracted to the opposite as much as I am the similar. I want to stop hating myself, I have worked for years to move on from the idealized vision of perfection within my mind, to accept the true, flawed version of myself, and to love it. And I am so close. So close. And now I have to deal with all this bullshit? From my religious community, I’m destined to burn in hell for all of eternity if I ever act on these atrocious feelings. From the community that’s supposed to accept me, I’m not gay enough.  
I don’t know what to do. I know my mother thinks gay marriage being legalized is good and the discrimination against gay couples is wrong. But when confronted with the idea of her own daughter belonging to that community the word that left her mouth was “disappointed”. And that’s just one fourth of my immediate family. There are no openly gay memebers of my family at any level, in any state. I don’t know if I’m brave enough to be the first. I don’t know what my father would say, if my mother was disappointed, I’m frightened of how this could hurt him if I ever tell him. My grandmother, I have no idea whether she even accpets the gay communtiy as human. I have been too scared to ask, even before I started asking my own questions. She has never commented either way. Aunt Liz I think will start to argue about how it's wrong, even though she hasn’t been to church in decades. Even though I have no evidence of her beliefs to go on. I think I’m scared of Aunt Jenny’s reaction the most. I think she’ll want to support me, but I can’t be sure. If she thought I was doing something wrong, she would not hesitate to tell me and she would not hold back. I think most of my cousins would be okay with it, but not all of them. Lily knows and I think she’s okay with it. She seems like she’s okay with it, but I’m still not really sure. Cristin, gosh Cristin. I’m so scared she’ll hate me more than she already does. Her religion is everything to her and if I openly defy it? More than I already have been? And in the worst way possible? What if that causes a break I can’t fix? I’m not ready to risk that. I don’t think I ever will be.  
They are everything to me.  
The thought of bringing someone home to Thanksgiving, or to Christmas, it makes me so happy. The thought that I might, one day, be accepted and welcomed by my family for who I truly am gets me through the long Sunday morning speeches and dry hymns. The thought of introducing and showing off my significant other, someone with whom I am deeply and truly in love with, showing everyone the best that they can be, and how happy they make me everyday, how wonderful and beautiful they are, it gets me through each early morning service. But it inevitably comes crashing down around my sinful ears when that final sobering question makes itself known. “But will you still be welcomed, will you still be loved?”  
How can I know if I don’t test the waters? How can I test the waters without them suspecting? How can I survive the suspicion without my disappointed mother’s support?  
I’m tortured by the thought of being good enough, but how can I be good at all if I live in the sin of same-sex attraction? How can I love, even live, with myself if I choose this “lifestyle”?  
It feels like I have two choices. My religion. My bisexuality. My religion, which raised me, which taught me the inherent goodness and value in my fellow human beings. Which taught me how a sunrise will always follow the darkest night. Which taught me to love above all. My bisexuality, which brings me life. Which makes me feel alive. Which gives me a purpose I have lacked all of my life and an answer to the questions I have asked since I was ten. I must choose between who I have been and who I can be. They cannot co-exist.  
I hate the past and yet I fear the future. I don’t know if I can choose between the two. As much as I want to blend the two together, to make them peacefully coexist, I don’t think they can. There is just too much hate directed at me, by others and myself.  
I know who I want to be, but I don’t know if I have the strength to be them.


End file.
